How Drugs Affect the Brain

Drug addiction affects every aspect of a person’s life. It’s a powerful disease for many reasons. Drugs react with the brain and nervous system to create a dependence that is hard to break. Read on to learn about drug addiction and how drugs affect the brain, along with the ways Crest View Recovery Center can help.

Learn How Drugs Affect the Brain

Specifically, the brain controls everything that we do. It controls all of our movements and thoughts, along with how we feel both physically and emotionally. Our brains allow us to think, solve problems and make decisions. Furthermore, it even controls involuntary mechanisms needed for our very survival, like breathing and heart rate.

It’s a specific part of the brain that is actually responsible for addiction. In fact, this is the limbic center, and it’s sometime referred to as the brain’s reward center. The limbic system produces feelings of pleasure.

Feel-good chemicals are released by the limbic system when a person uses drugs. In order to continue feeling good, the individual will want to keep taking drugs. This leads to addiction.

Specifically How Drugs Affect the Brain

This continued drug use actually changes the makeup of the brain. Continual exposure to drugs lights up the reward system of the brain. This then tricks the brain into thinking the drugs are something that is needed for survival. Thus, an addiction is formed.

Dopamine is an important brain chemical that plays a role in addiction. When ordinary things such as sleep, food, drink and leisure activities cause the limbic system to release dopamine, the levels are normal and expected. Drug use causes dopamine levels to spike and flood the limbic system at an unnatural rate.

Crest View Recovery Center Can Help

If you’re considering professional help for substance abuse, CVRC can offer the drug addiction recovery you need. Our staff approaches each client as an individual and has the expertise to create a custom treatment approach.

Now that you know how drugs affect the brain, you understand why professional help is often necessary. Therefore, overcoming addiction requires specific resources to break the physical and emotional hold drugs have on the body and brain. Give us a call at 866-327-2505 to learn more about our services and how drugs affect the brain.